Git Commit Messages Are Useless

At Trunk, we've configured our Git setup to not enforce the arbitrary commit message required rule. This saves us a lot of time, and we highly encourage everyone do the same

The journey along the way is inconsequential. The ultimate source of truth is the code — everything else is a slowly decaying version of the truth.

When we lose faith in our tools to deliver meaningful signals, bad practices emerge. We can see similar bad user behavior in regard to test failures. When our tests are flakey, we start to write off the signal a failing CI run provides. The noise drowns out the signal to the point where we consider everything noise.

As you become an efficient engineer, the path you took to get to the final state of a pull request becomes far less important — and is academically interesting at best. You shouldn't have to show your work like you did in school. Land the feature or bug and move on to the next one. The code speaks for itself (alongside some judiciously placed comments).

Commit messages on your random PR branch which will get squash-merged into main are completely useless. They're the author's local save points, and not relevant to anyone other than the author. In fact, for the vast majority of authors they're not even relevant to the author. We all write them, and they cost the collective engineers of the world countless hours writing ridiculous messages like, "changed something", "did work", or the super descriptive, "stuff".